Nvidia at Computex: GameWorks goes VR, G-Sync comes to mobile

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We’ve already covered the launch of Nvidia’s GTX 980 Ti, the $649 killer follow-up to the GTX Titan X, but that’s scarcely the only thing Nvidia is talking about this week. The company has kicked off a fairly massive set of announcements, with fresh information on multiple projects and programs. We’ll start with G-Sync, Nvidia’s program to improve game experiences by smoothing frame delivery.

G-Sync goes mobile, windowed

The last time we talked about G-Sync, it was to discuss claims that mobile G-Sync could be enabled by something as simple as a driver update (and, at the time, mostly debunk them). Nvidia told us at the time that mobile G-Sync absolutely was on the company’s long-term radar, and it’s now ready to talk about that feature in more detail.

Nvidia will bring G-Sync to laptops that use panels approved for the technology. Panel capability is important — the display needs to support the variable refresh timing and other aspects of the embedded DisplayPort (eDP) standard that the mobile version of G-Sync relies on. eDP is the standard that AMD first used to demonstrate FreeSync on mobile devices several years ago, and Nvidia has confirmed that while it will offer G-Sync on mobile hardware, it won’t need to use dedicated scalars or other proprietary ASIC implementations to deliver the feature.

Nvidia has said that it’ll institute a licensing-and-qualification procedure for displays, which implies that this will be a custom, boutique-oriented capability. G-Sync is also coming to windowed displays, presumably in an upcoming driver update. Up until now, G-Sync has been a fullscreen-only feature. Windowed G-Sync will also work in two-way SLI configurations (but nothing higher) and can be enabled or disabled on a per-application basis if games don’t play nice with the feature.

The one caveat to this support is that Optimus — Nvidia’s battery-saving technology that utilizes an integrated IGP to drive desktop and 2D work when on battery and the full GeForce GPU for gaming — will not be compatible with mobile G-Sync. The two features will be mutually exclusive. Nvidia believes that mobile power consumption at idle on Maxwell is good enough not to harm battery life much (and most gamers don’t play on battery for long periods anyway), but we’ll have to wait for shipping hardware to check this.

GameWorks goes VR

VR is steadily advancing as the Next Big Thing in gaming (depending on who you believe, at least) and Nvidia is determined to carve themselves a piece of the action. The company is launching what it calls Multi-Resolution Shading to improve VR performance and building the capability into GameWorks as another library.

One of the problems with VR as compared with standard screen rendering is that the lenses we look through for VR require warped images to match the display’s optics. If you render the game as if its being displayed on a conventional LCD panel, then crop the image to match the viewing field, you’ll wind up rendering many pixels that never get displayed. The other problem is that detail gets poured into screen edges that don’t require it — the human eye sees much more detail dead-center then around its own periphery, and at the viewing distance of a VR headset, this difference matters.

What Nvidia does with its multi-resolution viewport technology is subdivide the image between a high-detail central image and lower detail peripheral images. Then, detail can be projected where needed depending on where the player is focused at any given point in time. This kind of approach, according to Nvidia, can improve pixel shader performance by 1.3x – 2x depending on the title and the degree of detail in the scene.

I’m curious to see what the approach can deliver. I realize that people are going to bristle at the idea of purposefully rendering display data at less-than perfect resolution — I used to bristle at the idea of gaming on three displays when the output that gets pushed to the other monitors is often blurred or distorted. In reality, however, these facts turned out not to matter much. The center display, where my eyes focused was perfectly clear — the information coming in from the periphery was useful, but the distortion didn’t bother me when actually playing a game.

Nvidia may have their finger on an approach that could yield real performance dividends in certain cases, but the fact that it’s sandboxed behind GameWorks could give some pause. Because multiprojection is already an Nvidia technology, there’s little to be gained from preventing AMD from using it — but sandboxing games into different VR implementations could effectively balkanize a burgeoning new field of gaming. AMD has been talking up its own LiquidVR initiative and the ability of the GCN-derived Radeons to render VR environments extremely efficiently. We’ll see which company has the better overall approach once both hardware and software are in the market.

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